L'ancien Président Harding se retrouve sous les projecteurs encore aujourd'hui. Cette fois ce sont les résultats d'un test d'ADN qui piquent la curiosité des observateurs. Certains auteurs ont longtemps défendu la thèse que des ancêtres de William Harding avaient eu des relations avec des noirs. Cette histoire a surtout circulé chez les ennemis et/ou opposants de Harding qui tentaient de le discréditer à une époque ou être noir ne constituait assurément pas un compliment. Au coeur de l'histoire américaine la question raciale? Difficile de nier...
"With Harding, it stuck for decades. Abigail Harding, his grandniece, said last week that her family told her that when she was a baby in the 1940s, a woman came up to her carriage on the street and said, “Just wanted to see if she was black.”
From the 1960s to the 1990s, the story was cited by black authors in pamphlets and books like “The Five Negro Presidents” and “The Six Black Presidents” to argue that several presidents had mixed heritage. More recently, the question was revived with Mr. Obama’s election in 2008.
The historian Francis Russell, in his 1968 biography of Harding, traced the story back to Harding’s great-great-grandfather Amos, who supposedly told descendants that a man spread the rumor that he was black to avenge being exposed as a thief. Another Harding biographer, Robert K. Murray, had a different explanation, writing that when the future president’s abolitionist family moved to Ohio, it lived in the same area with black residents and there was mingling.
The story gained traction with some when Amos Kling, a tycoon in Marion, Ohio, angry that his daughter, Florence, was marrying Harding, spread the rumor that he was black and tried to force businessmen in town not to do business with him."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/us/politics/dna-that-confirmed-one-warren-harding-rumor-refutes-another.html?ref=us
